Predictive writing probably will not change language use all that much - 9/24/18

It seems like every few weeks another pundit notices Smart Compose, a Gmail feature released earlier this year that offers to complete your sentences as you type. And every time this happens, we get a new set of speculation about how this is going to fundamentally change how we use language. The paradigm case of this appeared in a Twitter thread by some guy named Jude Gomila:

A few points:

1. Spelling standards relax and tighten all the time for all kinds of reasons - technological changes, institutional enforcement, changes in literacy rates among different socioeconomic groups, the introduction of new sounds and spelling from other languages, and so on. Generally, however, they remain bound by at least one constraint: both the writer and the reader has to be able to comprehend what has been written.

Predictive text does nothing to this constraint. The writer will still have to be able to recognize, in the auto-completed text, something resembling what she would have written; and the reader has to be able to understand it. For this reason, everyone will still have to understand a "correct" spelling in the sense that it reliably conveys one word and not others.

2. If anything, it seems to me like predictive text would play a standardizing role, since it will tend to spell certain words certain ways. You will almost always encounter the word "orthography" spelled with a ph rather than an f, whether you are the writer or the reader; you will constantly be reminded of this spelling, and will presumably internalize it accordingly.

3. Gomer writes that "[V] is going to change [W] forever." He predicts that it will have "profound implications for our [X]". He concludes, "Long live [Y]. Long live [Z]." These, of course, are all stock phrases and formulations that English speakers routinely use in the course of communication. As it turns out, "using similar phrases" is an utterly ordinary and unremarkable feature of language use; predictive text allows us to transcribe them more quickly, but it is not somehow creating a cognitive opportunity that was not already there.

Anyway, my guess is that predictive text will probably make it quicker to say things you would have said anyway, and will occasionally become a nuisance when you want to say something statistically unpredictable, a problem we already run into with auto-complete. Probably won't do much more than that.